Thanks to the recent release of her fourth album Red, Taylor Swift has been seemingly everywhere lately–all over the radio, chatting and performing on TV, and splashed across the covers of various magazines.

The latest magazine to feature the country superstar is Cosmopolitan, which has Ms. Swift scheduled to grace the cover of the December issue.

Inside, she talks to the magazine about her music, of course, and also touches on her dating life. The latter is more theoretical than specific–spilling thoughts on the ups and downs, ins and outs, of dating.

Taylor Swift on Cosmopolitan (courtesy Hearst Magazines)

She is, you might expect, something of a romantic. As she says, “I need that unexplainable spark…I just need to see someone and feel ‘Oh, no, uh-oh.’ It’s only happened a few times in my life, but I feel like if I was gonna be with someone forever, it would be because I saw them and I thought, ‘Oh, no.’”

But she’s also practical–and very sensible–about the people she spends time with romantically.

“I’ve had a lot of dark and twisty situations happen,” she says, “enough to realize that when someone exhibits signs of evoking a dark and twisty relationship and dark and twisty feelings, it’s not interesting to me.”

And listen to Taylor speak honestly about the games that so many people play. “I think a lot of times when you meet someone you feel like you need to appear like you’re not interested in them so that they’ll be more interested in you. But what happens when you start showing him that you actually like him? What’s he gonna do then? Play the tape forward; how do you keep a guy like that? I don’t want to sign up for that.”

The conversation steers further into the future, with Cosmo asking whether Taylor can imagine ever doing anything beside making music. Taylor’s answer? “Being a mom full time, doing everything for my kids, having a bunch of them.”

See more from Taylor Swift’s interview on cosmopolitan.com; and pick up a copy of the mag when it hits newsstands on November 6.